Excursions

Nine... A number that has haunted me for more than a month. Would wake up with a stare at it. Take a shower, get ready and face the indolently eying number. Stagger while using it. Bump into it daily. On numerous incidents. Each one having a negative effect on my mood. Just adding to my already tangled life. Twisting it further. Something usual has happened today too. Today i.e. on 9th of this month. 9th. And hence this post.

Yeah i know. The prologue does seem a bit dramatized. But last part is indeed true. The normal routine things for last one-one n a half month have made me bump into '9', unusually, a lot. And it has succeeded in screwing up my mood on most of the occasions.

First up. The most common and tiresome experience of my life. I have been staying on the ninth floor of a "still-under-construction" n beta version of a 15 floored guesthouse. Thats not all. Its each and every part was under development and testing at the same time. And we, the guests, were bloody testers.

Lets start with a moment to reach there. You say use lifts. Simple right? Not so soon. The 3000 capacity guest house just had a single lift working for major part of my stay. Best being 2. You say "whats the big deal"? Ok, this lift can be any one of the 10 lifts scattered at various different locations on the ground floor. You say "uhh now thats complex". I say wait. Not all are on the ground floor. 2 are on first. Further take this. Each lift can take you only till/to a particular floor after or below which you have to scroll using stairs. Does that sound scary? Listen to this. The lifts were also in the "under-development-and-testing-part" list as most other parts and so had a most ill programmed chip fitted into her. Usual symptoms:

1. She used to wend  the 1st-> 0th floor path via 10th floor. That too without any entrant.
2. She used to suddenly halt its march on the most deserted floor, without sucking anyone in or puking anyone out.
3. She used to make you guess the time she would take to shut her doors for you. It ranged from sweet 10-20 secs after you are mounted or a quarter of a second by which you escaped getting crushed between her doors. (Yes she had no sensors to detect if you were in between her claws-like doors.)
4. She used to making a most ear-deafening moan if you make her wait for a little longer. (A typical girlish behavior. You are not allowed any mistake to be made on your part.)

By god's grace i did reach the coveted 9th floor most of the times. The fact that it normally took me around 10 mins on average matters least considering what lied ahead. The floor was divided, in true sense, in 3 parts using wooden walls. So care had to be taken that you end up in your part. Else you had to crawl through the stair case. The corridors were mostly cementy because of its under contruction tags with most confusing directions (refer snap). Air conditioners in the room worked on random basis and when they did they made my teeths tremble with cold. The taps randomly decided the temperature of the water that come out. (I have got my bum burned once. No further explanations.) The mirror was situated at the darkest corner of the room with the most clearly visible part being my toe nail.

I have spent 44 days in this complete mystery house. There were other encounters with nine like never returned 9 rupees as change at the food terminals, 9 cubicals that i hopped along or the  9AM alarm that brought with it the invitation to begin the journey on mystery land of nine. The tales of these will follow up sometime later.

Finally there was just one saving grace i had with me which provided me the sole reason to go through this tortourous journey. People close to me know whom am speaking about. But i am observing a striking pattern there too. Each 9th of a month brings with it some problems. I can't explain but it does. I hope this hauting effect of 9 stops pressing me to my limits. I hope it stops testing my patience. Signs are not too good. Post is published in the 9th hour of the second half of the day. Ninth hour. Nine.

I have always been faced with this puzzle for quite long now. What happened to me shouting i would have best house on the whole street? What happened to my plans buying the best car in the town? Where is that dream life with servants running all round? The fridge full of ice creams, pastries, chocolates, chicken (leg-straigntened sky-pointing turkey, to be precise) ? The television set running just cartoon movies day long with remote just in my hand? To be the richest man, the most honest person, the man blessed by blessings from poor, loved by one n all. The whole lust for attaining some position, achieving some goal, some ambition seems to be lost somewhere.

And now? Now is the case i have just one ambition left. Crawl through the work week mechanically just to feel and shout: TGIF... Thank God Its Friday.

Finally i have found the reason for this loss of ambition. See and examine it for yourself :)

Now i know who uhhh what is the culprit. And yes TGIF :D

Yesterday i had quite a random dream. Random indeed it was. For the most part of it i was pretty happy about what i was experiencing. And suddenly i went blank. I would say the dream went blank. Making me befuddled. Completely perplexed. Full of queries, queries for myself to answer. But before i get into the dream itself, let me blabber my views on dreams in general.

Dreams are angels. Yes, they have the power to make you experience the bests and worsts of your life at the same time. Indeed we experience the dreams, not just see them. How else can you explain your turning, jumping, twisting, crawling, grawling in the sleep. We are experiencing the event, the dream. I myself have woken up thanking god for turning whatever i experienced into a dream. And then there are those times when i just put myself to sleep again, just to experience what remained incomplete, unexperienced.

Further, the dreams are mutable portkeys. I feel i change lives in dreams. Butterfly effect you can say. But there one can decide if he wants to change his life. Here i don't. It all depends on my other self, the dreaming threaded me. If he wants me there, i go. Otherwise i just lay here, wake up and continue.

Details. Two threads, if dreaming together, show how the life each is experiencing. We exchange both the positives and negatives. Yes, if you notice, each dream comprises of both goods and bads. We experience some scenes of that life, both happened and yet to happen. Yucks and Wows. If both agree to switch, we switch.

Now you see this concept explains a lot of usualities. Take Deja Vu. Yes indeed it is that 'yet-to-happen' scene of the life. We experienced it in the dream before we made the shift. Those jerky wake ups. May be the other self just slapped me for spending such sucking life. Or may be i did it to him for his sucking life. Roaming with unknowns. Yes, you don't afterall expect two me's having the same set of friends. Those long nights can be the result of just a mismatch between timings of two threads. Same goes for the short nights.

I will stop. Remove your thinking caps and plunge into the dreamland with the view. You might find quite a few interesting answers.

Anyways back to my dream i dreamed yesterday. I dreamed i was a singer, i was singing well. (Ok, i never said the other me has to be "me"ish. He can indeed me quite contradictory to who i am right?) Audience were happy. I saw my struggle. I saw my first assignment. I was watching myself happy. I watched all the happy me's. Nothing bad. No yucks. And suddenly it was blank. I don't remember something like this happening earlier. The dreams changed. The places changed. I woke up suddenly. But it never happened that the dream turned blank, with me facing eternity full of whiteness.

Puzzled, I lay there, closed eyed and open minded, waiting for something to happen. But all in vain. Blank. Whiteness everywhere. Finally i woke up and tottered my way along ... With mind full of questions. Unanswered question.

Along my surf through the web net (hmm tautology), found a lively garfield (now oxymoron) cartoon.

Now same is with me. Truly i feel i draw a quite of  parallels with the dude Garfield. I am lazy, a bit overweight and i adore eating and sleeping. Even i hate Mondays (more on that here) and feel diet is a “die” with T. Me too hate spiders. A kind of sudden chill runs down my spine when i face that fraternity. Even the lucky bite for Peter Parker could not change my lovely hatred for spiders. I have tried entering a lot of weird things mind including fruits, mornings and various other animates and inanimates.

And this strip just elevated my similarity levels with garfield. I feel i, too, am a little too ‘Garfieldish' generous. I mean i provide my helping hand to someone just to end up with a feeling that i was too generous to do that. All because i was totally involved working his work out (!!!) I mean why do i have to do that. No need. What rather i should have done was to just provide a helping hand. Not my full hand.

I know garfield won’t have worked this way. He would never have worked this hard. I need to do that too. I need to learn that too. Stop working. Just provide the helping hand and remove it. Anyways the help hardly gets noticed in todays world. Am i turing selfish? Yep… thats another parallel with Garfield!

Now this is the topic that hits me everyday, atleast 3 times a day.. uhh .. usually more than that. Somehow i could not pen it out. Finally here it is. But before i move forward,  a confession. This post is mainly with reference to the males. Am not sure how it applies to the other sex. But lemme just blabber it out...

Each day i usually rise, heavy stomached and ill faced, from my seat. Do something awkward between strolling and bustling. Course the floors of my office/home. Finally bang the door and enter the place. And choose a urinal. Now that's where it is supposed to end. But it does not. Something more happens. More on it in a wink.

Let me first speak out the reason for this whole rush. Firstly i have somehow got molded into someone who likes playing with critical situations. Be it deadlines (not at work though.. have to say ... have to say..:P) or my daily chores. Secondly, its all about the pleasure one gets from the sudden and mountainous relief  through abundant pouring. I hope you understood.

Anyways back to the track. The most interesting part follows. Each time i visit the "relief camp", i see am not alone. There is this whole bunch of varied group and thats when my thinking cells awake and start noting few things. Now let me blog down few of my notes:

• Usually the bunch refrain from the meeting each others eye sight. Each time they do, there is this sudden jerk of the neck, as if something exceedingly hot touched the eyeball, throwing the sights up or out.
• Most of the campers stare at the roof, either with eyes closed or 'blink'less. May be the roof falls in between. What they are staring is the heavens. Afterall what one attains is, indeed, a divine pleasure.
• There are those few who are relieved enough that they start bubbling at their mobile handsets, basked in the abundant relief.
• If there, incase, is no vacant one, mind clog with this NP hard problem of where to stand and where to stare. Few follow the route to WC, few stare in the mirror rubbing their faces, few pridefuls even walk back. There are also those few who, just unknowingly out of all the unbearabe tension, wash off there hands!

Now there are few more notes in my mindbook. But for now this is it. Need to totter along. Need to attain the pleasure. Here am off.

Lets have a look at the word cloud for this random messy place. I am surprised to know that i blog most about “blog” and i “know” a lot too!!!

Courtesy: Wordle

What follows is just a prologue. If you want to directly hit my thoughts on me being superstitious, surf to the last line :)

A guy named B.F.Skinner once carried out an experiment on pigeons to demonstrate the formation of superstition. He placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon “at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior.” His discovery in his own words:

The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

More on this and its connection with me and my being superstitious here.

I always wanted to add my tweets to my blog, to pen in the sudden and randomly generated vibes in me. I use to do that at twitter. But i wanted to pull in the thoughts at one place. As i owned the place now, i thought of a dedicated section for the purpose and hence came into existence the “Blabber Land”.

If you follow the link, you can find the live demonstration of twitter in blog under the first section named “Abrupt Blabberings”. The procedure is pretty not-so-complex sorts. And with a simple but informative article like this your work is greatly reduced. Thanks Remy …

But still it would need a bit of a scripting and customizing on your part, for better results that is. Few points to remember (basically the ones i didn’t :P)

1. Make sure you add the <div id=”twitter”> section at a proper place. Before pulling the tweets, book the place holder and test the looks with the dummy data. Customize the div section.


2. Add the pre-fetch message at the blog. Let user know something is about to happen in the section. A progress indicator would be a plus.


3. Now add the scipt that fills in the place holder booked earier i.e. the <div> section. Make sure you rename the tweet in getTwitters('tweet', to the id you have mentioned in the <div> section above. So in this case, it should be renamed as “getTwitters(’twitter’,”


4. Adding the script section towards the </body> tag of your page would always be favorable. The simple reason being the browsers don’t start any parallel downloads i.e. of images etc as long as they don’t download the scripts. It is always recommended that scripts, wherever possible, should always come right at the end, after most of the page is completely loaded.
   

Yep that’s the way it is whenever you ask that renowned question to even slenderly educated guy. There is this eerie feeling in being superstitious. But i feel knowingly or unknowingly, we do follow superstition. Ok, lemme not talk about the universe for whole. Taaadaaa … I, myself, do follow superstition. Or lemme say i am the most superstitious guy among the people i know. No better proof than my following acts …

1. I maintain my position for the whole match whenever india is winning a cricket match. Or whenever something, out of my control, is happeing in accordance with my wish.


2. I try and change whatever i can when something is not betiding as i wish, to find out that right position to maintain (refer 1)


3. As far as possible, i try and avoid … Uhhh … the path crossed by a cat. I know thats really foolish of me. But that is just to keep my mind away from any unwanted superstitious thought, if something bychance goes wrong.


4. I have my own “tasks-not-to-do-now" list which i, by all possible means, avoid to carry out.

Ok, i will stop this whole self-bashing ceremony now. I know there would be pretty more. Will add them whenever am frustrated with myself. Anyways, I feel most of my superstitious acts are more of an attempt to prevent my mind from wandering in the dusty desert of superstition. You see if something does go wrong if i didn’t do __, at the back of my mind it keeps tinkering me, further adding to my superstitious feeling. That’s superstition to prevent increasing superstition.

But i know whatever i say, i need to stop doing this. I need to stop falling to superstition just for the sake of not falling for the greater ones. I know .. I am working on that … Have already overcome few of mine. Blog on them soon …

By the way, i did find an interesting article. A guy named B.F.Skinner carried out an experiment on pigeons to demonstrate the formation of superstition. He placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon “at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior.” His discovery in his own words:

The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

So i guess i now know how it all started for me. I was ruined socially. Heres all my energy to end that … :)

Wishing all Indians, including myself, a Very Happy 62nd Independence Day. Been a great start, let me revisit the most prestigious moment for an Indian.

Its really an amazing feeling watching Indian flag raised above others. Kudos to the Golden Boy, Abhinav.

Update: I dunno for some obscure reason, i see most of these videos are pulled out from youtube, for some copyright infringement i guess. You can watch the video here.Thanks Shrirang for bringing this to my notice.